Troy Cooley, who heads Cricket Australia's centre of excellence in Brisbane, last week announced that Graeme Hick, who with Mark Ramprakash formed a duo of the most prolific yet ultimately underachieving cricketers of the modern or indeed any other era, is being recruited to teach young Australians the art of batsmanship. Proper batsmanship that is, the kind where a century is merely a milestone passed on a longer journey.

Hick knows all about this: 136 times in first-class cricket did he reach three figures but he had the drive, concentration and technique to convert these into doubles, occasionally triples and once, memorably, a quadruple. In this day and age of biff-bang T20 ambition, CA reckons, the skill of batting time has been lost. So it has brought in someone who did it better than most. And a Pom at that. How low can you sink?

That Australian cricket is in a mess needs no clarification. All that needed to be said emerged during the disastrous, humiliating trip to India where Murphy's Law kicked in and anything that could go wrong did – most of it, of course, at their own hands. In Test match terms, Australia batsmen have become frail in thinking and flabby in technique; there are pace bowlers of considerable promise but physical fallibility, the result, many good judges think, not of too much bowling at an early age but not nearly enough. And since the retirement of Shane Warne, 11 spinners have been tried in Tests and none has succeeded in establishing a place.

The fall from their position of being not just far and away the best side in the world but one of the greatest to the sorry state in which they find themselves now, has been astounding by any standards. In these circumstances any series represents a major challenge but in facing their next three Test series – successively against England, away and at home, and away to South Africa – Australia will be stretched as they might never have been before.

On Wednesday the process begins when the national selector, John Inverarity, announces the touring party who will contest round one of the Ashes double-header that begins in July, and if there was a time even four years ago when the team came close to selecting themselves, then those days are long gone. Trying to second guess this is like a retro-trip back to Peter May and England in the 1980s.

There is little room for manoeuvre with the bat for, as Hick pointed out on his appointment, only one batsman not involved in Test cricket had scored more than one century in the season's Sheffield Shield by the end of January, a state of affairs unheard of hitherto. The fact that no one scored more Shield runs than Ricky Ponting is not helpful to the cause, nor that only he and Chris Rogers, now at the age of 35 and helping to galvanise Middlesex, scored more than two centuries. It may be that in order to bring some old-fashioned tenacity to the side Rogers gets a summons, the sort of retrograde step that once would have been anathema.

But if there is any logic to the selection of the remainder of the batsmen, from the central contracts list, then aside from Michael Clarke, who has been carrying the batting single-handedly for a year, the prospective candidates are all openers by nature or manufacture: Shane Watson, whose disaffection with Clarke appears to continue with his resignation from the vice-captaincy; David Warner, Phil Hughes, Ed Cowan. No middle-order batsman has made a case, with Usman Khawaja no longer contracted and not helping himself by being one of the chastised "Homework Four" while also gaining a reputation for vulnerability against the moving ball when playing for Derbyshire last season.

The pace bowling could be extremely competitive but depends heavily on who is occupying the treatment table. James Pattinson, Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins could well form the nucleus of the pace attack in the future but in the interim it was the indefatigable Peter Siddle who held things together in India, and the robust Ryan Harris, himself returned from injury, whom England learnt to respect during the last Ashes encounter.

There have to be spin options, particularly at the back end of the season. Neither Nathan Lyon, Xavier Doherty nor the all-rounder Steve Smith were close to being good enough in India and the search goes on. It is possible that a tall, young left-armer from Western Australia, Ashton Agar, of Sri Lankan descent, could be a wild card, particularly as he has batting pedigree as well.

In the meantime, all eyes are on the Australian immigration department to see if a passport can be hurried through for the asylum-seeking Pakistani leg-spinner Fawad Ahmed, who took 16 wickets in three games for Victoria, and is reckoned by Stuart MacGill to be the best spinner to play in the Shield since Warne. Such a process would seem to go against the Australian grain – but needs must.